Mayumi Sarai: Recent Sculpture    Apr 28 - Jun 4, 2005

Lohin Geduld Gallery is proud to present the first New York solo show by Mayumi Sarai.

In the sculpture of Mayumi Sarai, we find an artist contemplating her relationship with the natural world. Repeated biomorphic forms cluster and bundle together like animated models of cellular growth patterns. They are infused with personality, arguing that the parts and the whole are inseparable. Nature for Sarai is not a romantic construct or an idealized utopia. Rather, Sarai defines nature through the small everyday epiphanies of recognition and belonging that come to us all from time to time. In Sarai's worldview, human thought and action are not outside the natural world, but are reflections of it.

Sarai's wood sculptures are painstakingly carved and shaped; each chisel mark and gouge leaving meditative markings as evidence of the joy she finds in the creative process. Sarai's forms suggest utilitarian human activities such as braiding hair, weaving baskets, and harvesting crops. They also speak of a need to visualize the spiritual realm. African fetish and fertility sculpture have influenced Sarai, as has Buddhist art from China and Japan. Brancusi's modernist transfigurations of tribal forms are also present in Sarai's work.

The power of Sarai's sculpture, however, is not found in these associations. The power of these works derives from our ability to recognize aspects of the world through them. Mayumi Sarai gives us a conduit through which our understanding can flow and what is revealed is simultaneously extraordinary and strangely familiar.

Mayumi Sarai was born in Aichi, Japan, and moved to New York City in 1991. She studied at Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo and at the New York Studio School. Her work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Hunterdon Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, Noyes Museum of Art, Morris Museum of Art, New Jersey State Museum, Cidnee Patrick Gallery, Dallas, TX, College of the Ozarks, Point Lookout, MO, Cooper Gallery, Jersey City, NJ, and the Washington Art Association, Washington Depot, CT. She lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.